Linux for Desktop?

Is a great OS, is it? Yes, it is but not for everybody. I consider myself a beginner in Linux even I can find my way out via CLI (command line interface) most of the time. But this is not the point.

What I want to say is Linux is almost on everything, from phones like Android OS, laptops like Chome OS, devices with an embedded OS like IOT’s, DVR’s NVR’s, Cars, Refrigerators and a lot of other things. And of course, we can't forget the servers. I will just say on servers Linux overtakes Windows but this is a different topic.

Let’s concentrate on the end user, that person who besides turning on/off the PC or laptop and surfing the web, paying bills and looking at pictures/movies and maybe writing something in a text editor doesn’t do anything else. I would say technically Linux would be perfect, it is free pretty much immune to viruses and there are a lot’s of flavors to chose from (probably too many), the most common once are Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Mint, Suse, Debian….. and a lot more.

I personally tried several times to get away from Windows but I’m kind of stuck with it. Don’t understand me wrong I use Linux almost on a daily basis but not as much as desktop OS, for web hosting, cloud systems, servers …. and of course, my phone is an Android 😊. Unfortunately, I'm using some software for work what is available only for windows. I do have a little laptop with Linux what I'm using in the filed as a tool but this is not for the common user.

Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop

Not a long time ago I had a tentative to switch my desktop to Linux. And the main reason for it was my Windows 10 got slower and slower after this updates (my desktop is a fairly old machine which was working amazingly with windows 10, at least the beginning), I actually added a second SSD and installed the new Ubuntu 18.04. I must say, at first look, was a nice experience.

Hangouts are working just fine same as Skype.

However I did experience a few issues with Google Chrome after opening 6-7 tabs basically the PC froze, searching on the web it seems like others have the same issue. Firefox is behaving pretty well.

LibreOffice is included in pretty much any distro (distribution) also available on Windows and Mac

Shotwell is used for picture viewing (in this example on Ubuntu)

Rhythmbox is used as a default music player (on Ubuntu on other distributions it may be different)

Ubuntu's File Manager is pretty straightforward.

Ubuntu's Software Center

Adding software from Ubuntu Software Center (USC) is pretty easy also. if you want to install something that you can't find in USC then you need to grab your CLI skills from under the pillow to install them. Sometimes is easy enough sometimes not.

So in the end, if you are a light user and you don’t what to spend money to upgrade your system you can try out a flavor of Linux. If you are using some windows only software then you are out of luck. Is Linux perfect, not at all, a big community is working on it to make it better so we need to give them credit. If Chrome OS is enough for some users, one of these flavors of Linux should be more then enough for others. Worth a try.

In this example, I used Ubuntu OS but just because I had this installed on my desktop. You can choose any other flavor of Linux. It may take some time till you find the one fits you. I would suggest to try it out in a virtual environment like VMW Player or VirtualBox.